265 Comments

Very proud to be Scottish right now. I was stunned to see how quickly this trend continues to grow. It’s all the more impressive given our history of sectarianism.

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I'm pleased to see that the Scots are with the trend which we see here in the States in the growth of the non-religiously-affiliated. Indeed, they're well ahead of us. The one thing I didn't see in this article is the reaction we've seen in the US from the Religious Radical Reich. They apparently don't have that particular brand of Christian.

Lucky them!

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Glad to hear it! Tell that piper to keep up the good work! 👍

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"...[C]hurches should no longer be allowed to sit on council education committees, and that state schools should no longer promote religious observance."

Such a good idea. Hopefully they will make it official. Too bad we have it backwards here in the states, with churches officially off of such governmental entities but trying their damndest to weasel their way in.

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Thing is, we already made it official, some 200+ years ago. Something about: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."

Anyone remember that?

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Ah but you see those are more like guidelines than an actual code.

- some Supreme Court Justice

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Sounds like something Originalist Justice Three-Fifths would say. 🤔

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There’s a local loonie who keeps insisting that only Congress shall make no law…. States, he says, can have official religions if they want.

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Someone needs to remind said loonie about Article VI, paragraph 2 of the Constitution, to wit:

𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑤𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑈𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑃𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑢𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑜𝑓; 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒, 𝑜𝑟 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒, 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑈𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠, 𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒖𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒎𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒘 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒏𝒅; 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐽𝑢𝑑𝑔𝑒𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑏𝑦, 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑟 𝐿𝑎𝑤𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔. [emphasis mine]

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And because of Confederates trying to use the same loophole that Maltnotthops' looney wants to use, Congress made the same point AGAIN in the 'privileges and immunities' clause of the 14th amendment.

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Oh, that’s been pointed out. Repeatedly. The loony’s response is that SCOTUS has improperly legislated from the bench in interpreting the constitution.

One of the better retorts from the rational side — and I wish I could take credit but it wasn’t my idea — was a scenario involving a state government adopting a Shaker-type religion. The rational person asked the loonie if a state could, as part of its religion, require pregnant women to have abortions because having children violated the religion. The loonie said that was ridiculous and refused to answer the question.

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SHALL BE! Double emphasis there.

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🤢🤢🤢🤮

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BRAVO for Scotland!

Hopefully we in the USA can someday match this & attain an atheist majority. We need to put to an end the dumbing-down of people, the harassment of teachers, librarians & scientists, book bannings, book burnings, the gutting of school curricula, the underfunding of education & libraries, the wanton making of laws/regulations/policies that ram religionite doctrines & views upon normal folk, etc. Like a wounded beasts, religionites & churchlings are at their most dangerous when dying. Let us work to make their passing mercifully quick so we can minimize the harm they'll do on their way out.

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Organized fundamentalist religion, such as the Dominionists should be euthanized.

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"This is a disaster for the Church of Scotland."

Not seeing a downside to that. :)

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“But our faith and our relevancy cannot be expressed simply as a set of numbers in a table." that about says it all. Put your head in the sand and your fingers in your eyes and cry out "la la la la la".

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62% of people under 24 identify as nones? The kids are alright.

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That they are, and more compassionate, except for the captive, religious home-schooled bunch. They aren't allowed to be sociable and learn about other viewpoints.

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Rendering them totally incapable of dealing with the outside world.

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“….. the numbers are “hurtful” but also meaningless.” Meaningless? IMO what is meaningless is a dumbass statement like that.

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The hurtful comment struck me as so weird. It's a government census report; publishing numbers is what they do. There's no more malice in it than there is in a traffic light turning red in front of you.

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Imagine the results if religion was forced on children at sch... Wait a minute !

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I guess we'll need a set of tiny bagpipes to go with our tiny violins now.

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“But our faith and our relevancy cannot be expressed simply as a set of numbers in a table." What utter rubbish! The percentage of the Scottish population with no religion has been ticking up since 2011. That fact the CofS and all the other churches have failed to look inward and align themselves to a changing world and populace is on them entirely. They should have been reflecting on what about their faith, their approach to their faith, and the way they present their faith to the world was having the effect of pushing people away rather than drawing them in. Instead, like most religions, they've been busy blaming their failures on 'society', 'the internet', popular culture, or any number of straw men - when the answer was staring them in the face all the while.

This news gives me hope for this country. Stephen Bullivant pointed out in his book 'Nonverts' that people in Europe and the UK have been trending secular since WWII. It took a while for that trend to catch up here in the US, but it's happening. And for the same reason - religion just isn't seen as relevant to people's lives. And no amount of SCOTUS decisions boosting the rights of the religious over the nonreligious will change that trend - it will only accelerate it.

Brilliant news! Made my day! Now I know where to move if the Orange Cretin wins in November.

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I'd go with "If you are religious, by which denomination, if any, do you wish to identify? It is okay to also state you are not religious."

It does not assume, but is open to faith, and reassures that it is acceptable to not be religious without condemning or mocking those who are.

I am open to reasoned criticism on the matter.

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Works for me, but I'm not a pollster, nor do I create polls, so I'm not fluent in poll-ish.

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Pollsters want to ask the same question the same way (and usually in the same sequence) each time around in order to get data that's comparable from one survey point to the next. Changing the wording of the question muddies the waters anent how to interpret changed answers: Was it people's ATTITUDES that had changed or just their UNDERSTANDINGS of the question?

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My ideal was to provide a single new form which would be ideal for use in the foreseeable future. And yes this is absolutely a known issue to the programming world - there's a name for it I don't quite recall - but it involves someone making a brand new language that unifies umpteen other languages together.

For obvious reasons, linguists have a passing familiarity with it as well, I hear.

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It's a great idea, until you realize that literally every year or two, the new boss will have their own idea of the New Form To Be Used For The Forseeable Future. One part of the calculation of 'change or stick' is: 'if we don't stick very long with the change I propose, is it still worth doing.'

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Yes, that is why I described it specifically as a problem. I do know how words work, thank you. :)

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The way demographers deal with this — and they'll be the first to admit it's got problems of its own — is to have a couple of intermediate surveys in which they ask the question both ways (usually spaced out rather than one right after the other) so they've got a sense of how the answers relate to each other before switching entirely over to the new wording. In the US, probably the most familiar example of that was the decades-long transition to asking about ethnicity as a category separate from race, so that the choice was no longer a single one among Black, White, or Hispanic but rather a dual one of (a) Black or White and (b) Hispanic or not.

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The census in the UK is less a poll, but a mandatory survey that carries a criminal conviction if not completed.

That said, the religious questions differ between England and Wales, which differs from Northern Ireland, which differs from Scotland. Because each of the three sets their own census.

The religion question on the England and Wales census, and the Scotland census, were voluntary.

The issue you point about question type is also relevant. The latest census attempted to address some of the problems which were outlined about previous censuses.

Here in NI it changed somewhat for the better:-

"In Northern Ireland there were two questions one on what religion you belong to, the second on what religion you were brought up in. The stated options were all Christian with an ‘other’ write-in option. ‘None’ was placed below this. This question was not marked as voluntary unlike the other UK countries."

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And then why leave out x other ethnicities entirely such as Polynesians et cerera. I try to make very precise word salads on order. :)

Two things I love are helping people and solving problems.

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Frankly, "ethnicity" is almost as mushy a term as "race", which is why more recent surveys have gone from "Pick the ONE that best describes you" to "Check all that apply".

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According to "MyHeritage DNA", I've got 3 ethnicities'.

Am 64.8% Celt, 30.2% English, and 5% Eastern European.

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Other minorities religions come under "Other Religion".

There's an extensive list of categories and the corresponding codes for the census, that can be seen under "Variables", at the "Religion in the 2021/22 Census" page on the UK Data Services website.

Though I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some folk have been missed.

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Good point the few polls I have taken never fit my answers.

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Same here. For me the questions are designed to fit into a group that I’m not part of.

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“But our faith and our relevancy cannot be expressed simply as a set of numbers in a table."

What exactly would you say you do here, Champ?

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I want to know how relevant is the worship of an alleged being whose existence can in no ways be determined or verified.

Doesn't sound very damned relevant to me! 😝

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Scotland the Brave, indeed.

Gee, that's too bad for you, Church Of Scotland. Here, let me play you something on my bagpipes.

https://youtu.be/K-Op1Mng4oY

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See, this is what happens when you accept the metric system. There isn't enough room in a person's heart for Jesus and the kilometer. They chose the kilometer. They rejected Jesus. And now they are going to burn in hell at 6700 degrees Réaumur.

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That would be a fair observation, except the UK, including the Scottish bit, still works in miles.

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So, there are true Scotsmen left!!!

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Haaa!

Not according to the fallacy.

But yeah, I wear nothing under my kilt. But then I'm Ulster-Scots.

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I suspect the numbers in the table would be trotted out as evidence of their faith and relevancy if those numbers were more favorable.

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Aveugles un jour, aveugles toujours

"The Church of Scotland attempted to put a spin on the bad news, suggesting that the numbers are “hurtful” but also meaningless."

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